Category: What the heck is

Pinging is actually the action where a certain aggregator is notified whenever your web log or blog is updated, so that the aggregator may show the freshest post of your blog on their website. This is also a very useful method to pulling in some traffic to your site.

Sending out a ping is like raising your hand in class to announce you have something to say. Your teachers, the search engines and aggegators are waiting to hear you speak. If you don’t ping the weblog tracking sites to let them know that your site has been updated, how will they ever know. The bigger your ping list, the higher the chances of receiving traffic from those sources.

With that said, pinging is a great way to get the word out. Here’s a list of sites that I personally ping to inside my wordpress panel:

A trackback – is a word used mostly for search engine optimization purposes. In layman’s terms, when you post about someone else’s blog post elsewhere, your post will show up in their “trackback” section. It’s a very effective way for one to keep track of who’s linking and referring your posts. A permalink is used to create a trackback.

**Note: The trackback feature is not available with a Blogger.com account. However, if you are using WordPress as a blogging platform or website,trackbacks can be used to boost your search engine rankings.

Here’s a more technical definition from our trusted source wikipedia; A trackback is one of three types of linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles. Some weblog software programs, such as WordPress, CuteNewsRU, Movable Type, Typo,Community Server and Kentico CMS, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of linkback.

Permalink stands for permanent link, which is a URL (uniform resource locator) that leads to an individual post that you make in your blog. In other words, this page right here has a permanent link that you can copy and save or email or do whatever you wish with it.

For example, most people will use a permalink, if they find something on your site that interests them, and they want to let the folks over at their blog know about it. That’s when they will use what’s called a trackback to your site.

A keyword is a word or phrase that people use when searching for something in particular. Here’s an example:

A person turns on the computer because they need to find out where they can get the latest greatest Gucci bag. They absolutely have to have it. They saw the bag on “Sex In The City” last night. So they fire up google and enter the word “Gucci bag.” That word is the keyword. It’s what we want more information on.

WE HAVE TO HAVE IT!

Okay, so google or yahoo provides us a list of websites that have that word optimized on their page and the search continues. Ohhh Boy! Now what? After clicking several of the links on the results page, we can’t find the damn bag. What do we do next?

We shoot back over to google and enter this entire phrase “Gucci bag + Sex in the City.” That entire phrase is considered a keyword. You may have also heard the phrase “long tail keywords.” In a nutshell, that’s exactly what you’ve got there. A long phrase that we searched for.

What do you suppose your favorite search engine will do? It will search the entire web world for for sites that have those phrases on the same page. When your lists of sites arrive, you should most certainly have found the bag. If you didn’t, then write to your local congressman and let them know because that would be a darn shame 🙂

Social bookmarking is the process of using social sites such as digg, facebook and technorati to share, organize, search, and store the bookmarks of different website pages. In addition, internet users, such as yourself, have a plethora of saving options; you can save your favorite website bookmarks by date, by category, by keyword, by search engine or even chronologically.

Let’s face it, the internet is becoming more like one big social network. Hence, the sudden wave of new and exciting new websites that allow you to do all of the above with the use of feed (or aggregators). Aggregators (also known as, rss feeds, news feeds, feeders, or feed readers) are software programs that will capture snippets of information from your favorite websites and store it in one location for you; keeping you up to date on the most up-to-date information in one click of a button. My favorite is Google’s.

To put it simply, we have options. If you like a website and wish to share it, sites like furl and sphinn will help you to get the word out to all your friend in just a few clicks. This is social bookmarking stuff is powerful stuff ladies. Don’t underestimate it. Using these methods of social bookmarking properly can land your site on the first page of the search engines. Why not share what you think is interesting content? There may be other people who need the information that you’ve just read and you can help them by sharing it.

If you take a look at the bottom of this article, you’ll see little icons that represent a number of different social bookmarking sites. If you like this article and wish to share it with the world, just click on one of the little social bookmarking icons and spread the word. It’s really simple, yet very powerful in terms of letting others know what you think is good to great content.